The whiskey burns down like the last days of a cheap republic, a place where men once believed in themselves before they believed in the state.
And here we are again, staring down another round of tariffs, another dull-witted attempt to make a thing more valuable by making it cost more.
They say it is protectionism, like a dog chained to a fence, barking at the wind.
But what it really is... what it always is ... is a tax.
Like all taxes, it’s a slow rot that starts at the edges before it reaches the core.
The man in the corner, slumped over his beer, doesn’t care about steel quotas or retaliatory levies. He only knows that the price of his morning coffee is up ten cents, and the bread at the supermarket looks smaller, but the price tag looks bigger. He doesn’t understand why, and he doesn’t have time to. His job hasn’t given him a raise in three years, and he’s working harder just to afford less. That’s what tariffs do. They carve out invisible scars, dollar by dollar, until the man who used to be able to afford a new pair of boots every winter finds himself patching up the old ones with tape and prayer.
You can dress it up in a flag. You can call it America First, or Strengthening the Nation. But the simple truth is that tariffs are a tax on your own people. A tax on every worker who needs to buy a car, every mother trying to put food on the table, every kid whose shoes wear thin before the school year is up. The businessman with the warehouse full of goods sees his costs rise. He can pass them down, but there’s only so far they can go before the workers and the buyers stop showing up.
Governments like tariffs because they’re invisible. No need to pass an unpopular bill, no need for a committee hearing, no need to explain it to the people you’re robbing. Just slap a fee on imports, and let them figure it out when their wallets feel lighter. And then you wait. You wait for the retaliation. Because it always comes. Countries don’t take tariffs lying down. They hit back. Farmers who thought they had a steady export market find their crops rotting in silos. Manufacturers who sell abroad start getting squeezed.
And the worst part? The very industry you claim to protect ends up weaker. You give it a crutch, a subsidy disguised as a tariff, and it forgets how to compete. It gets lazy. Bloated. Soft. You might think you're saving jobs, but you’re just delaying the funeral. The market moves faster than any government decree, and in the long run, the market always wins.
Protectionism is a lie told by men who don’t understand that value isn’t dictated by borders, by politics, or by the size of a tariff sheet. It’s dictated by reality, by the cold, unrelenting logic of supply and demand. You can’t cheat it. You can’t dictate it into existence with a stroke of a pen. You either produce something worth buying at a price people are willing to pay, or you don’t. Everything else is just noise.
So, when the man in the corner goes home, when he sits in the dark staring at a stack of unpaid bills, he won’t know what hit him. He won’t see the tariff itself. He’ll just see the aftermath—the dwindling grocery list, the extra shift he has to pick up, the little things that start slipping away. That’s what tariffs do. They steal from the invisible hand and give to the fumbling fist of bureaucracy.
And when the dust settles... all that’s left is a nation that’s a little poorer, a little weaker, and a lot more lost than before.
1/2
S. Tominaga AKA CSW
Mar 20, 2025
https://x.com/CsTominaga/status/1902631777216426438?t=CagQJh_w9mYo32A00MsEsg&s=19
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/2714
And here we are again, staring down another round of tariffs, another dull-witted attempt to make a thing more valuable by making it cost more.
They say it is protectionism, like a dog chained to a fence, barking at the wind.
But what it really is... what it always is ... is a tax.
Like all taxes, it’s a slow rot that starts at the edges before it reaches the core.
The man in the corner, slumped over his beer, doesn’t care about steel quotas or retaliatory levies. He only knows that the price of his morning coffee is up ten cents, and the bread at the supermarket looks smaller, but the price tag looks bigger. He doesn’t understand why, and he doesn’t have time to. His job hasn’t given him a raise in three years, and he’s working harder just to afford less. That’s what tariffs do. They carve out invisible scars, dollar by dollar, until the man who used to be able to afford a new pair of boots every winter finds himself patching up the old ones with tape and prayer.
You can dress it up in a flag. You can call it America First, or Strengthening the Nation. But the simple truth is that tariffs are a tax on your own people. A tax on every worker who needs to buy a car, every mother trying to put food on the table, every kid whose shoes wear thin before the school year is up. The businessman with the warehouse full of goods sees his costs rise. He can pass them down, but there’s only so far they can go before the workers and the buyers stop showing up.
Governments like tariffs because they’re invisible. No need to pass an unpopular bill, no need for a committee hearing, no need to explain it to the people you’re robbing. Just slap a fee on imports, and let them figure it out when their wallets feel lighter. And then you wait. You wait for the retaliation. Because it always comes. Countries don’t take tariffs lying down. They hit back. Farmers who thought they had a steady export market find their crops rotting in silos. Manufacturers who sell abroad start getting squeezed.
And the worst part? The very industry you claim to protect ends up weaker. You give it a crutch, a subsidy disguised as a tariff, and it forgets how to compete. It gets lazy. Bloated. Soft. You might think you're saving jobs, but you’re just delaying the funeral. The market moves faster than any government decree, and in the long run, the market always wins.
Protectionism is a lie told by men who don’t understand that value isn’t dictated by borders, by politics, or by the size of a tariff sheet. It’s dictated by reality, by the cold, unrelenting logic of supply and demand. You can’t cheat it. You can’t dictate it into existence with a stroke of a pen. You either produce something worth buying at a price people are willing to pay, or you don’t. Everything else is just noise.
So, when the man in the corner goes home, when he sits in the dark staring at a stack of unpaid bills, he won’t know what hit him. He won’t see the tariff itself. He’ll just see the aftermath—the dwindling grocery list, the extra shift he has to pick up, the little things that start slipping away. That’s what tariffs do. They steal from the invisible hand and give to the fumbling fist of bureaucracy.
And when the dust settles... all that’s left is a nation that’s a little poorer, a little weaker, and a lot more lost than before.
1/2
S. Tominaga AKA CSW
Mar 20, 2025
https://x.com/CsTominaga/status/1902631777216426438?t=CagQJh_w9mYo32A00MsEsg&s=19
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/2714
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